Berner and I were fraternal twins—she was six minutes older—and looked nothing alike. She was tall, bony, awkward, freckled all over—left-handed where I was right-handed—with warts on her fingers, pale gray-green eyes like our mother’s and mine, and pimples, and a flat face and a soft chin that wasn’t pretty. She had wiry brown hair parted in the middle and a sensuous mouth like our father’s, though she had little hair anywhere else—on her legs or arms—and had no chest to speak of, which was true of our mother as well. She usually wore pants and a jumper dress over them that made her look larger than she was. She sometimes wore white lace gloves to cover up her hands. She also had allergies for which she carried a Vicks torpedo inhaler in her pocket, and her room always smelled like Vicks when you came near her door. To me, she resembled a combination of our parents: my father’s height and my mother’s looks. I sometimes found myself thinking of Berner as an older boy. Other times I wished she looked more like me so she’d be nicer to me, and we could be closer. Though I never wanted to look like her.

I, on the other hand, was smaller and trim with straight brown hair parted wide on the side, and smooth skin with very few pimples—“pretty” features more like our father’s, but delicate like our mother. Which I liked, as I liked the way our mother dressed me—in khaki pants and clean, ironed shirts and oxford shoes from the Sears catalog. Our parents made jokes about Berner and me coming from the postman or the milkman and being “oddments.” Though they only, I felt, meant Berner. In recent months, Berner had become sensitive about how she looked, and acted more and more disaffected—as if something had gone wrong in her life in a short amount of time. At one moment in my memory, she’d been an ordinary, freckle-faced, cute, happy little girl who had a wonderful smile and could make funny faces that had made us all laugh. But she now acted skeptical about life, which made her sarcastic and skillful at spotting my defects, but mostly made her seem angry. She didn’t even like her name—which I did like and thought it made her unique.

After my father had sold Oldsmobiles for a month, he was involved in a minor rear-end traffic accident while he was driving too fast in his demonstrator, and was also back on the base where he had no business being. After that, he began to sell Dodges and brought home a beautiful two-tone brown-and-white Coronet hardtop with what was called pushbutton drive and electric windows and swivel seats, and also stylish fins, gaudy red tail-lights and a long whipping antenna. This car likewise sat in front of our house for a period of three weeks. Berner and I got in it and played the radio, and my father took us on more drives and we let the air rush in with all four windows down. On several occasions he drove out the Bootlegger Trail and let us drive and taught us to back up and how to turn the wheels correctly for skidding on ice. Unfortunately he didn’t sell any Dodges and came to the conclusion that in a place like Great Falls—a rough country town of only fifty thousand, brimming with frugal Swedes and suspicious Germans, and only a small percentage of moneyed people who might be willing to spend their money on fancy cars—he was in the wrong business. He quit that then and took a job selling and trading used cars on a lot out near the base. Airmen were always in money scrapes and getting divorced and being sued and married again and put in jail and needing cash. They bought and traded automobiles as a form of currency. You could make money being the middle man—a position he liked. Plus the airmen would be apt to do business with a former officer, who understood their special problems and didn’t look down on them the way other townspeople did.

In the end, he didn’t stay long at that job either. Though on two or three occasions he took Berner and me out to the car lot to show us around. There was nothing for us to do there but wander among the rows of cars, in the shattering, hot breeze, under the flapping pennants and the silver flashers-on-wires, gazing at the passing base traffic from between the car hoods baking in the Montana sun. “Great Falls is a used car town, not a new car town,” our father said, standing hands on hips on the steps of the little wooden office where the salesmen waited for customers. “New cars put everybody in the poorhouse.